Project Management Exams, Consciousness Presentation

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Last Thursday sat the gruelling PRINCE2 Practioner exam; this Thursday have a Project Management exam, and the following Thursday, an Advanced Project Management exam, latter two more orientated towards PMBoK. The main difference between the two is that the former gives a highly structured process with organisations, whereas the latter provides a toolkit of techniques. Using both, simultaneously, is increasingly my recommendation. Very interested to see that the ISO is introducing project management systems.

Philosophy Forum meeting yesterday had yours truly presenting with the evocative title: "Mary, the Swampy Philosophical Zombie, Is In Your Chinese Room!", an outline of theories and models of consciousness, followed by problems with physicalist reductionalism, and finally with varieties of dualism. Personally, I sit somewhere between property and predicate dualism. There was an excellent turnout and very good discussion. I have also been fortunate to have engaged zombie-advocate David Chalmers in some discussion on the subject.

Comments

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Whether you take a physicalist or idealist approach to monism, you will still have to able to reduce mental states to brain states. I don't think it is possible, for example, to explain concepts like "love" in terms of pure electro-chemical reactions, or even for that matter, the phenomenal experience of the colour "blue". I do think that such qualia depends on electro-chemical reactions, but is greater than the some of those parts - not the least because of the strong association of language I have with linguistic mediation. At least part of our experience of qualia, I believe, arises from a socialisation process - which means that even our thoughts are not entirely our own.

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"even our thoughts are not entirely our own."
With subliminal messages I´ve long suspected that !!!